Growth in the use of the Internet, and in particular that part of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (WWW), has been extremely rapid in recent years. Much of the success of the WWW is due to the simple and efficient way in which an enormous number of separate documents (or files) may be linked together, allowing a user to browse through related documents merely at the click of a mouse button.
WWW documents (or pages) are written in a language known as Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML) which lies somewhere between conventional computer programming languages and plain English text. A link to a page on a WWW server may be included in some other WWW page by including the Universal Resource Locator (URL) of the “referenced” page in the HTML file corresponding to the “referring” page. For example, if one wished to include a link to the WWW page of the European Patent Office in some other WWW page, then the following line could be added to the corresponding HTML file:                <A HREF=“http://www.european-patent-office.org”> European Patent Office</A>        
This would result in the WWW page displaying “European Patent Office” as a clickable link.
A common source of annoyance for users of the WWW is the return of a message, after a link has been clicked, indicating that the WWW page at the requested URL cannot be located. This situation often results from WWW pages being deleted from a WWW server or alternatively being relocated to a new URL.
Redirection tools are available for redirecting an original request to an out of date URL, to a new URL. Typically, this involves running an application at a WWW server where the requested page is located, and which intercepts requests to the URL and replaces them with a request to the new URL. Whilst this results in the correct page being delivered to the Web browser from which the request originated, it does not address the fundamental problem, i.e. the incorrect URL incorporated into the clicked hyperlink.